The Daily Show: Bain Damage

The hot political story of the moment is Mitt Romney’s old venture capital company, Bain Capital — which happens to share the same name as the most frightening and current Batman villain from the new movie “The Dark Knight Rises.”

Not since Ayds Diet Candy suffered through their somewhat ill-timed late-’80s “Lose weight with Ayds” sales campaign has a brand faced this type of challenge. See, Romney’s whole campaign is based on the idea that he has run a business so he knows how to create jobs. There’s just one problem.

“When Mitt Romney was the CEO of Bain Capital in the ’90s, Bain invested in a series of companies including call centers and manufacturers that expanded overseas, sometimes at the expense of American workers,” CBS News reported.

In his defense, Romney never said he knew where he was going to create those jobs. It still doesn’t look good for Romney. Luckily, he’s got a bit of an excuse.

“Romney says he took a leave of absence from Bain Capital in February of 1999 to run the Salt Lake City Olympics, which means he never had control of the companies doing the outsourcing,” CBS News said.

Ah, now I see what happened. He never had anything to do with the outsourcing because at the time Romney was too busy bringing foreigners to America to take our gold. There actually is one small problem with Romney’s explanation. Between 1999 and 2002, Bain Capital’s SEC filings stated that Romney was the CEO, president and managing director of the firm, and the company paid him at least $100,000 per year.

“The documents show there is a difference between ownership, which is I owned shares in Bain, but I did not manage Bain … When you leave an enterprise and you have other people that are managing the enterprise who take full responsibility for all the investment decisions, who decide who is going to get hired and fired, who decide compensation decisions they’re the manager, they’re the people running the business,” Romney said.

Romney was just the guy with the smokescreen-ish, yet still legal title of CEO and managing director who was paid at least $100,000 a year to do what was — according to him — nothing. And that’s the kind of common sense business experience he intends to bring to the White House.

“He took a leave of absence and in fact he ended up not going back at all, and ended up retiring retroactively to February of 1999 as a result,” said Ed Gillespie, Romney’s senior adviser.

Retired retroactively?! See, in 2012 Romney realized the company he was CEO of in 1999 did things that would hurt his presidential campaign in the present so he retroactively wasn’t there. I’m not saying that if you have a time machine you necessarily have to kill Hitler, but this retroactive retirement is the worst use of a time machine I have ever seen.